Juxtaposition: A Decompartmentalized Zone

If you aren't programming yourself, then someone else probably is.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

The Real Deal on Bohemian Grove

Recently, I was asked for my take on Alex Jones and Michael Aquino, famous names in the conspiracy sphere of cyberspace. I was also asked to elaborate on hints I had given about Bohemian Grove, in a conversation I was involved in. As I despise long prefaces, I'll get right to it:

You asked what I found out about Bohemian Grove. Since how I found out about it is a fifty page email inofitself, I will refrain from going into that and direct you to this link:

In western Sonoma County you have a whole lot of ex-hippies that moved out of the Haight Ashbury area a long time ago and many of them are aging. Also here you have a biker community, a gay community which, oddly, seems at odds at times with the lesbian community. There is also a Renaissance Faire community that consists of performers of Renaissance Faires, amongst other things. In addition, there is a masonic-rosicrucian community and a scientological community, though smaller.

Now, on the surface this community is pretty complete, whole, and cohesive. Behind the scenes, however, is a never ending posturing and fighting for favorable opinion, as if nearly everyone is running for some office.

One thing that seems to run like a barely visible thread through it all is a string of nearly inaudible intelligence operations and outfits, from Mossad to others of a more Aryan nature, not to mention what west coasters often refer to as the "hippie mafia." Like a trail, this thread runs east and up into the mountains, through Calistoga and ultimately into Lake County. Lake County gets all those new police toys before anyone else anywhere does, including surveillance technologies. From Monte Rio (location of Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County) to Clear Lake, California (Lake County) is about a one and a half hour drive.

Now, understand that you can drive from Clear Lake to Monte Rio five times a week, at twenty over the speed limit, down Mark West Springs Road, and you will never get pulled over. This is a major methamphetamine pipeline, among the biggest in California and if you know anything about the topic, you will know that California is among the highest in meth use anywhere. In fact, along this route you are likely to find damn near any kind of drug you want.

Now, I would like to be clear on one thing and that is drugs: I think that certain inebriants have their place, though the more dangerous ones have theirs alongside nooses and carbon monoxide poisoning, both of which probably yield some sort of rush before accomplishing their purpose. My issue with the drug trade in this area, around Bohemian Grove, is that kinder, gentler drugs are systematically suppressed to maintain the market niche for methamphetamine and all too often, meth is used to induce various forms of behavior modification and sleep deprivation is an intrinsic part of this. As well, after a few weeks of regular meth use, the brain stops producing its own seratonin, relying on the drug to maintain a state of being awake. If you try to quit, it can take up to three weeks for the brain to start producing its own seratonin again (seratonin wakes us up and melatonin puts us to sleep - both triggered by light sensitive pineal gland) and that is a long time to go without being functional. This is why it is so dependency inducing.

Also, when one is dependent on one's dealer for consciousness itself, it becomes really easy to like one's dealer an awful lot and even excuse anything bad they do. In fact, it becomes easier to believe anything that such a person says. Like any other comfort or necessity, rationalizing whatever it takes to get it is easy. It is for this reason that the sex slave trade in California and other places is booming these days.

Now, young men that find themselves caught up in this also, invariably, find themselves surrounded by young women who, themselves, are willing to do almost anything to stay in the fold, and in some cases, anything at all. Often, young men that have, for whatever reason, been deprived of a social life and/or a sex life (as so many dysfunctional Americans are) are particularly susceptible to the allure of a sort of underground stardom. Get one of these people hooked on meth, given that he had been sufficiently socially deprived beforehand, and then take away the meth, the attention, the feeling of being on the inside of something, the girls, and the state of being awake itself, and some of these young men will do whatever it takes to get back on the inside. In such a case, what you have is a manufactured terrorist or assassin.

It was in this area where I would, by pure intuitive deduction, realize the connections ages ago between Templars and Assassins and one of the core pieces of lore around the Assassins is referred to as the Garden of Delights. At the garden of delights, men would awake having been drugged and kidnapped and suddenly find themselves surrounded by beautiful women catering to their every need and every manner of inebriant, too, was at one's fingertips. After a good while, they would be drugged again and put back in the desert and told that they had been cast from heaven and to return, they must carry out certain acts. If you have never experienced a powerful hallucinogen then this might not seem feasible. The power of some substances, accompanied by the right, engineered circumstances and setting, can be extremely potent. Imagine my amazement when I came across a book entitled The Templars and the Assassins, a couple of years later, only to find a review by Michael Aquino who lavished praise upon it.

To answer one of your questions, yes the mystification and associations created around a man like Aquino prompts the average investigator to look no further, to an inner truth, like the core of an onion. Most would look no further than that he has been accused of satanism and child molestation but we must not lose sight of his alleged Spanish, aristocratic heritage and his honorary Green Beret status. I call it honorary because, looking at him, I have a hard time believing that Colonel Aquino spent much time covered in mud and blood, in any jungle anywhere. Who knows?

Remember that scientist, in the Carolinas or maybe Virginia, that was murdered, in the wake of the anthrax attacks, by two teenagers in a ritualistic, satanic murder? No one looked any further into it did they? Repulsed by what one has uncovered, it rarely occurs that it could be a cover for something more sinister, if less sensational. Meanwhile, innumerable microbiologists have disappeared.

Back to Lake County, home of many unsung members of Jonestown, Pomo Indians, that often aren't talked about. Here, you have a new age community that consists in part of idealists and in part of psychic predators. A person with an open mind has advantages in the realm of spiritual growth and learning and disadvantages in resisting the charms of psyoperatives. One example of what I speak of is that the Mossad refers to MDMA as the "fuck and tell" drug.

Let's go a little further south and east. Some thirty miles or so to the southeast of Bohemian Grove is the home of the Temple of Set, in Marin County, arguably the richest county per capita in the United States. In this area, you have a local lore that is downright scary, one that claims that this is the best area in the world to live if you like to have your children outright disappear. Remember Polly Klaas? Now, the loose connection I can make to Michael Aquino, in my experiences there, experiences that involved attempts at trauma programming (they underestimated my resourcefulness when it comes to disappearing, utterly), is that many of the memes and paradigms he champions are also championed by the street folk of Santa Rosa, which is Spanish for Saint's Rose, which will come in later. The strong connection I can make to Michael Aquino, or the amazing coincidence (take your pick) is that I once spent a great deal of time with a man named Stephen Flowers while I was there. Serendipitously, the man that supposedly took over the Temple of Set after Aquino, I would later read, shared the exact same name. Whatever Stephen was into, he never let me on while we were together and we spent a good deal of time together. Same man? Good chance, I figure.

Santa Rosa is where I would hear that what I was going through was called the Ring of Fire. Johnny Cash wasn't just muttering some ditty. I think scientologists call it the wall of fire. Now the ring of fire also has to do with a psychiatric method involving something called groupthink, I've read, and the only thing I ever saww on it was brief and put out by a publisher called Tavistock (info on Tavistock Institute is here). This ring of fire business is a closely guarded secret and I was only able to barely penetrate it. One of the things that I find disturbing is that these people that talked of it have something in common with scientologists, whom purportedly, as I have said, call it the wall of fire and this is a belief in a spiritual hierarchy involving extradimensional beings (of a decidedly parasitical nature, it seems to me). As these people I once knew put it, "There is no planet he hasn't taken." The mysterious "he" was never named but if he is to be known by his fruits and defined by them, well, if you have read thus far you know what "he" represents. It is psychic fascism. Here, I would be told, "You would make a great spy." This was also where it was suggested that I drive a truck full of explosives into the police station.

Onward in an easterly direction, in the neighborhood of about a hundred miles, takes us to the Vacaville Medical Facility and the work of Jolyn "Jolly" West. Jolly was the psychiatrist in charge of a character known as Cinque, leader of the former Symbionese Liberation Army, the outfit that kidnapped and brainwashed Patti Hearst. Strangely, or not, West was also at one point in charge of the mental health of Timoth McVeigh and, believe it or not, Jack Ruby, the man who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald. You can look it up. It's all out there.

Now, let's take our discussion still a little further south, to the Presidio, the avenue that turns into 19th Street in San Francisco. The Presidio is the location of the child daycare center that Aquino used to RUN for a small Army base there. Aquino was accused of all manners of sexual abuse of minors there and escaped any retribution. This is also an area where an inordinate number of homeless people have, apparently, disappeared over the years.

If you go just a few miles down the Presidio, a bit past where it turns into 19th Street, you will find yourself face to face with the largest Scottish Rite temple that I, personally, have ever seen. In truth, it dwarfs anything remotely masonic I have ever seen, unless we are to consider the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose or certain structures in the District of Columbia. I have never, personally, seen the Rosicrucian Museum, situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, but I hear it is enormous.

Let's go further south, to Santa Cruz, which is Spanish for Saint's Cross. Do you begin to see?

Halfway between the Saint's Cross and the Saint's Rose is the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple. Have you ever heard of the Rosy Cross? These elements have, apparently, been in place there since the naming of these towns.

Bohemian Grove is named after the Bohemian Club of San Francisco (an actor's guild of sorts from a hundred years back or more) which in turn is named after Bohemia which is in Czechoslovakia? Read up on Jacob Boehme some time, whose name curiously resembles that of this region. This should not be taken as a blanket condemnation of all who consider themselves modern "bohemians" but Jacob Boehme's philosophies are decidedly masonic in nature. To this day, Czechoslovakia has the world's best acid, or so I have heard.

Now ask yourself, why would actors make the best spies? The answer should be obvious. A good actor can make you think about him or her anything they want you to think. In the midst of all this stuff, in the San Francisco bay area, regarded as a bastion of anti-establishment thinking by some, we have actors entertaining the world's most powerful people. Is it just entertainment, I wonder, or does a little drop of something in a politician's drink, accompanied with theater designed to reach deep into the psyche, affect the course of worldly events?

To answer the Alex Jones question, he has ignored all my attempts to divulge this to him and has summarily ignored me altogether. Also, I am quite sure that one doesn't slip in and out of Bohemian Grove with or without a camera without being invited. Period. I don't consider him just another Texas boy.

It would be prudent to note that, contrary to some's instinct to leap from a fear of things masonic to the embrace of things Christian and/or Catholic, when the ops grew the most horrific, when I really thought I was going to break, there was always an emissary of some sort waiting on the fringe to take me into the Christian fold. My escape route was always through some Church or Mission, or so they thought. It's called controlled opposition. My choice was to be a spy or a lamb and I choose neither, thank you very much.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Zion

TODAY:

Shadia P. Drury: "There is a certain irony in the fact that the chief guru of the neoconservatives is a thinker who regarded religion merely as a political tool intended for the masses but not for the superior few. Leo Strauss, the German Jewish émigré who taught at the University of Chicago almost until his death in 1973, did not dissent from Marx's view that religion is the opium of the people; but he believed that the people need their opium. He therefore taught that those in power must invent noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit." [Source: Leo Strauss and the Grand Inquisitor]

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Experiments on elderly echo Nazis

JERUSALEM: Three Israeli doctors are under arrest over illegal experiments on thousands of patients, including an elderly concentration camp survivor who narrowly escaped being a victim of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

These human trials involving mostly old and mentally disturbed patients - some of whom died - echo those in the Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II.

Berta Wiesel, 83, was among the dead. She was sent to Auschwitz from Ukraine and forced to part from her twin sister to escape Mengele's experiments.

The doctors include the deputy director of a prominent geriatric facility. Among the experiments conducted for several years until 2004 were invasive procedures on the stomach and bladder.

During one with an appetite stimulant, patients in a "control group" were left underfed for several weeks. Some on whom experiments were conducted gave permission only with a thumbprint.

Joseph Barel, the director of Kaplan Hospital, one of two hospitals at the centre of the inquiry, said: "The doctors say that patients gave consent, and these things are being checked by the police."

Monday, October 16, 2006

A Rush to Medicate Young Minds

By Elizabeth J. RobertsSunday, October 8, 2006

I have been treating, educating and caring for children for more than 30 years, half of that time as a child psychiatrist, and the changes I have seen in the practice of child psychiatry are shocking. Psychiatrists are now misdiagnosing and overmedicating children for ordinary defiance and misbehavior. The temper tantrums of belligerent children are increasingly being characterized as psychiatric illnesses.

Using such diagnoses as bipolar disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Asperger's, doctors are justifying the sedation of difficult kids with powerful psychiatric drugs that may have serious, permanent or even lethal side effects.

There has been a staggering jump in the percentage of children diagnosed with a mental illness and treated with psychiatric medications. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2002 almost 20 percent of office visits to pediatricians were for psychosocial problems -- eclipsing both asthma and heart disease. That same year the Food and Drug Administration reported that some 10.8 million prescriptions were dispensed for children -- they are beginning to outpace the elderly in the consumption of pharmaceuticals. And this year the FDA reported that between 1999 and 2003, 19 children died after taking prescription amphetamines -- the medications used to treat ADHD. These are the same drugs for which the number of prescriptions written rose 500 percent from 1991 to 2000.

Some psychiatrists speculate that this stunning increase in childhood psychiatric disease is entirely due to improved diagnostic techniques. But setting aside the children with legitimate mental illnesses who must have psychiatric medications to function normally, much of the increase in prescribing such medications to kids is due to the widespread use of psychiatric diagnoses to explain away the results of poor parenting practices. According to psychiatrist Jennifer Harris, quoted in the January/February issue of Psychotherapy Networker, "Many clinicians find it easier to tell parents their child has a brain-based disorder than to suggest parenting changes."

Parents and teachers today seem to believe that any boy who wriggles in his seat and willfully defies his teacher's rules has ADHD. Likewise, any child who has a temper tantrum is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After all, an anger outburst is how most parents define a "mood swing." Contributing to this widespread problem of misdiagnosis is the doctor's willingness to accept, without question, the assessment offered by a parent or teacher.

What was once a somber, heart-wrenching decision for a parent and something children often resisted -- medicating a child's mind -- has now become a widely used technique in parenting a belligerent child. As if they were debating parental locks on the home computer or whether to allow a co-ed sleepover, parents now share notes with each other about whose child is taking what pill for which diagnosis.

These days parents cruise the Internet, take self-administered surveys, diagnose their children and choose a medication before they ever set foot in the psychiatrist's office. If the first doctor doesn't prescribe what you want, the next one will.

There was a time in the profession of child psychiatry when doctors insisted on hours of evaluation of a child before making a diagnosis or prescribing a medication. Today some of my colleagues in psychiatry brag that they can make an initial assessment of a child and write a prescription in less than 20 minutes. Some parents tell me it took their pediatrician only five minutes. Who's the winner in this race?

Unfortunately, when a child is diagnosed with a mental illness, almost everyone benefits. The schools get more state funding for the education of a mentally handicapped student. Teachers have more subdued students in their already overcrowded classrooms. Finally, parents are not forced to examine their poor parenting practices, because they have the perfect excuse: Their child has a chemical imbalance.

The only loser in this equation is the child. It is the child who must endure the side effects of these powerful drugs and be burdened unnecessarily with the label of a mental illness. Medicating a child, based on a misdiagnosis, is a tragic injustice for the child: His or her only advocate is the parent who lacked the courage to apply appropriate discipline.

Well-intentioned but misinformed teachers, parents using the Internet to diagnose their children, and hurried doctors are all a part of the complex system that drives the current practice of misdiagnosing and overmedicating children. The solution lies in the practice of good, conscientious medicine that is careful, thorough and patient-centered.

Parents need to be more careful with whom they entrust their child's mental health care. Doctors need to take the time to understand their pediatric patients better and have the courage to deliver the bad news that sometimes a child's disruptive, aggressive and defiant behavior is due to poor parenting, not to a chemical imbalance such as bipolar disorder or ADHD.

The writer is a child and adolescent psychiatrist in California and the author of "Should You Medicate Your Child's Mind?"

Gitmo Lawyer Who Took on Bush Forced to Retire from Navy

Published on Monday, October 9, 2006 by the Associated Press

The Navy lawyer who led a successful Supreme Court challenge of the Bush administration's military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been passed over for promotion and will have to leave the military, The Miami Herald reported Sunday.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, will retire in March or April under the military's "up or out" promotion system. Swift said last week he was notified he would not be promoted to commander.

He said the notification came about two weeks after the Supreme Court sided with him and against the White House in the case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was Osama bin Laden's driver.

"It was a pleasure to serve," Swift told the newspaper. He added he would have defended Hamdan even if he had known it would cut short his Navy career.

"All I ever wanted was to make a difference — and in that sense I think my career and personal satisfaction has been beyond my dreams," Swift said.

The Pentagon had no comment Sunday.

A graduate of the University of Seattle School of Law, Swift plans to continue defending Hamdan as a civilian.

The 36-year-old Hamdan was captured along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan while fleeing the U.S. invasion that was a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Hamdan has acknowledged that bin Laden paid him $200 a month as his driver on a Kandahar farm, but he says he never joined al-Qaida or engaged in military fighting.

Hamdan turned to civilian courts to challenge the constitutionality of his war-crimes trial, a case that eventually led the Supreme Court to rule that President Bush had outstripped his authority when he created ad hoc military tribunals for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Swift's supervisor said he served with distinction.

"Charlie has obviously done an exceptional job, a really extraordinary job," said Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, the Pentagon's chief defense counsel for Military Commissions. He added it was "quite a coincidence" that Swift was passed over for a promotion "within two weeks of the Supreme Court opinion."

Washington, D.C., attorney Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said Swift was "a no-brainer for promotion." Swift joins many other distinguished Navy officers over the years who have seen their careers end prematurely, Fidell said.

Australian attorney-general insists sleep deprivation is not torture

By Richard Phillips9 October 2006

The Howard government’s assault on basic democratic rights hit a new and ominous low last week when Attorney-General Philip Ruddock told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he did not regard “sleep deprivation as torture”. Appearing on ABC-TV’s “The Insiders”, Ruddock claimed that sleep deprivation was merely “coercive” and had never heard of it being described as torture before.

Ruddock’s statement was made after high-level discussions in Washington with US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the recent Military Commissions Act 2006 and the future military trial of David Hicks, an Australian citizen incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay since January 2002. It constitutes an unambiguous attack on Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which defines “outrages of personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” of PoWs as torture and war crimes.

Notwithstanding his bogus claims, sleep deprivation is one of the cruelest forms of torture and is regarded as such by the Red Cross, Amnesty International and every relevant international legal and human rights body, including the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), to which Australia is a signatory.

In 1997, the United Nations Committee Against Torture categorically ruled that extended sleep deprivation was torture. Moreover, the US State Department’s “Country Reports on Human Rights” between 2000-2002 denounced several countries, including Burma, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, for using this technique and explicitly described it as torture.

Sleep deprivation limits the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen to the brain, causing lapses in memory, lethargy, intense pain and serious long-term psychological effects. Victims of the technique become dellusional, suffer hallucinations and other psychotic effects. Medical experts have also pointed out that it can cause brain damage, induce diabetes and other debilitating health conditions.

John Schlapobersky, who was tortured in apartheid South Africa during the 1960s and is now a consultant psychotherapist to the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, told the BBC in 2004 that: “Making a programme in which people are deprived of sleep is like treating them with medication that will make them psychotic.... It is the equivalent of bear-baiting, and we banned that centuries ago.

“I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis.

“By the week’s end, people lose their orientation in place and time—the people you’re speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity.”

The CIA codified these methods in its KUBARK training manual in 1963 and used it to train hundreds of police and intelligence officers from Latin America and other countries during the 1960s and 70s.

The manual explains that interrogators aim to instill in victims a sense of “debility, dependence, and dread”. This is achieved by “homeostatic derangement, fatigue, pain, sleep loss or anxiety”, which produces “regression of the personality” in the prisoner and “a kind of psychological shock or paralysis” required for “the dissolution of resistance”.

Opposition from human rights organisations

Amnesty International, the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties and former PoWs immediately condemned Ruddock’s statement.

Cyril Gilbert, now 86-years-old, was a prisoner of war in Thailand during WWII and a victim of sleep deprivation torture by the Japanese military. He angrily denounced Ruddock in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

“You don’t know whether you’re coming or going [with this torture],” he said, explaining that it was one of the worst techniques used by the Japanese military.

“I was lucky that I was only kept awake for a couple of days at a time. Others were kept awake a lot longer than that,” Gilbert explained. “He’s [Ruddock] never experienced anything, has he?”

“Ruddock seems to be saying that if you don’t leave any physical marks on prisoners then it’s okay, but sleep deprivation, which is used with sensory deprivation techniques, can make people totally dysfunctional. To say that this is not torture is outrageous and shows just how basic democratic values are being thrown away in this so-called war on terror.

“This is music to the ears of every dictator in the world and a green light for any government to accuse someone of terrorism, or supporting terrorists, and then torturing them, claiming that it’s necessary to discover possible future violent acts,” he continued.

“Australia is a signatory to the Convention against Torture. Is Ruddock suggesting that Australia should pull out of this convention?”

Bernie remarked that while the NSW Council for Civil Liberties would continue to publicly condemn Ruddock’s comment, there was no opposition from the Australian Labor Party leadership.

“It’s a real indictment of the federal opposition,” he said, “that they don’t want to say anything about this. Unless these questions are followed up in parliament nothing more is heard.

“Last year we had the extraordinary position of [Labor leader] Beazley on the government’s anti-terrorism bill, where he told caucus to support the legislation even though he had not even seen its provisions. On these issues there has obviously been a decision made in the ALP that they will not take on the Howard government. This is a very dangerous situation.”

This observation is important. Ruddock’s statements elicited little response from any of the opposition parliamentary parties—Labor, Greens or the Democrats—which have all embraced the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and accommodated themselves to the Howard government’s assault on basic rights.

Predictably, Beazley did not even bother to issue an official press statement, leaving it to Labor’s shadow attorney-general Nicola Roxon to make a few perfunctory remarks. Roxon issued a mealy-mouthed appeal to Ruddock to assure Australians that the government “remains opposed to all forms of cruel and degrading treatment”.

None of these parties has demanded Ruddock be sacked over his repudiation of the Geneva Conventions or that he and his fellow government ministers be charged with war crimes over their active support for Washington’s illegal imprisonment and torture of David Hicks and the now-released Mamdouh Habib.

Spearheading the attack on democratic rights

Ruddock’s claims that sleep deprivation is not torture is in line with his political record. As Howard’s minister for immigration from 1996 until mid-2003 he was notorious for stripping asylum seekers of their basic legal rights, describing them as “queue jumpers” and potential terrorists.

During this time the Howard government used military warships to turn back sinking refugee boats. Thousands of asylum seekers—men, women and children—were treated like criminals and incarcerated in virtual concentration camps in Australian desert regions or removed to imprisonment in Nauru and other South Pacific islands. Appointed attorney-general in 2003 Ruddock has spearheaded the Howard government’s attack on long-standing basic rights and legal principles. His attitude to sleep deprivation raises questions about what cruel and illegal practices he has already sanctioned, and what is being planned for the future.

While Hicks and Habib were being subjected to various forms of torture in Guantánamo and elsewhere, the Howard government was praising Washington for its treatment of the two Australians and publicly claiming that they were in good health and being treated well.

Ruddock’s claims about sleep deprivation received wide publicity, but another even more serious and chilling comment by the attorney-general has been virtually ignored.

Ruddock told the ABC he was concerned about Washington’s new legislation, which restablishes military kangaroo courts and gives President Bush exclusive power to interpret the Geneva Conventions and declare virtually anyone an enemy combattant, incarcerate them and suspend their basic legal rights, including habeas corpus. According to the attorney-general, however, the new law is too restrictive and “may well limit the capacity of intelligence organisations in the future.”

In other words, the repressive new American legislation does not go far enough. Would Ruddock like all bans on the use of torture to be lifted?

Sunday, October 15, 2006

A Brave New Pill

In 1992, U.S. Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado held hearings investigating the practices of psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Rep. Schroeder summarized her committee's findings as follows:

"Our investigation has found that thousands of adolescents, children, and adults have been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment they didn't need; that hospitals hire bounty hunters to kidnap patients with mental health insurance; that patients are kept against their will until their insurance benefits run out; that psychiatrists are being pressured by the hospitals to increase profit; that hospitals `infiltrate' schools by paying kickbacks to school counselors who deliver students; that bonuses are paid to hospital employees, including psychiatrists, for keeping the hospital beds filled; and that military dependents are being targeted for their generous mental health benefits. I could go on, but you get the picture"

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Jose Padilla: U.S. Government Gave Me LSD

An alleged operative for Al Qaeda imprisoned for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant is saying he was tortured and forcibly medicated with "a sort of truth serum" while in a Navy brig.

Jose Padilla, 35, was arrested in 2002 on suspicions that he was plotting a radioactive explosion, also known as a dirty bomb. He spent several years in a military jail in Charleston, S.C., without facing criminal charges. As legal wrangling over his fate continued, prosecutors in Miami charged him late last year with providing material support to a terrorist group and conspiring to murder, maim, and kidnap Americans abroad.

Lawyers for Padilla, who was born in Brooklyn and converted to Islam while in prison for gang-related crimes, made the claims of torture in a motion filed last week with a federal court in Florida.

"He was threatened with being cut with a knife and having alcohol poured on the wounds. He was also threatened with imminent execution," the chief federal defender in Miami, Michael Caruso, wrote. "Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations."

Padilla's attorneys argued that the alleged torture constitutes "outrageous government conduct" that requires that the criminal case against Padilla be dismissed. Judge Marcia Cooke has already dropped one of the charges against Padilla, but he could still be sentenced to life in prison on the other charges. The trial has been delayed until next January, at the earliest.

A top Al Qaeda leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, reportedly admitted during interrogations that he tasked Padilla with locating radioactive materials and scouting out locations for a dirty bomb. However, the pending indictment against Padilla makes no mention of such a plot.

A spokesman for the Navy referred questions about Padilla's treatment to the Justice Department. Prosecutors handling the case did not respond to calls seeking comment for this article.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Gitmo Prisoners are Enemy Combatants because Northern Alliance Said So

YET MONEY WAS THE PRIME MOTIVATOR FOR THEIR CAPTURE (THE OFFER WAS $5,000 FOR ANY TERROR "SUSPECTS"). GIVE US YOUR UNWANTED FOR SENSORY DEPRIVATION AND TRAUMA PROGRAMMING, PLEASE!

UPI - Amnesty International says that a majority of US prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were captured on a $5,000 reward. The nongovernmental organization said Friday that more than 85 detainees at the Cuba prison were captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance and in Pakistan when the cash rewards were offered for every unidentified terror suspect handed over to US custody. Amnesty said that Pakistani courts have refused to offer protection for hundreds of the country's citizens who were taken prisoner in mass arrests and "sold" to the United States as terrorists with only the word of the captors as proof. The prisoners were taken to Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Airbase, and secret US-run prisons around the world, the organization charged. About 300 detainees have been released from Guantanamo Bay with no charges brought against them and many prisoners remain unaccounted for, Amnesty said, leaving them in danger of rendition and torture.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Dystopia: On Neoconservative, Neoliberal Newspeak

TEHRAN, Feb. 14 (MNA) -- Most of the neoconservatives in the United States advocate globalization and the neoliberal economic model. What’s wrong with this picture?

At first glance, nothing is wrong with the statement because it is basically true. At second glance, everything is wrong with it.

Liberal and conservative used to be opposites. Now we have neoliberal neoconservatives. If the neocons are also neoliberals, how do we avoid confusion when using the words liberal and conservative?

It is natural for language to evolve, but when antonyms become synonyms, there is a problem.

The situation is similar to the Newspeak and doublethink of George Orwell’s book 1984. Newspeak was a language meant to control people by decreasing their power of reasoning through oversimplification of the language and doublethink.

Orwell wrote: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

There are now countless examples of this in the English language.

In war, civilian casualties are called collateral damage. The use of the expression collateral damage allows people to avoid the unpleasantry of having to think about innocent civilians being killed.

Every country used to have a war ministry, but they all later changed the name to the defense ministry or the defense department. In 1984, it was called the Ministry of Peace, or Minipax in Newspeak.

Try this simple exercise. Imagine you are listening to the radio and the newscaster says: “The war minister has just issued a statement.”

Now suppose the newscaster said: “The defense minister has just issued a statement.” Notice how a change of one word changed your reaction.

Consider the many acronyms that have entered the language such as NATO, NAFTA, and CIA. Their complete names, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement, and Central Intelligence Agency, contain the words treaty, free, free trade, agreement, and intelligence. On hearing these words, the mind naturally makes many free associations that cannot occur when the acronyms are used.

The neoliberal neocons themselves use a form of Newspeak.

The most glaring example of this is when neoliberal neocon officials in the United States tell citizens that they must take away some of their freedom in order to protect their freedom. Shades of Orwell’s “freedom is slavery”.

U.S. officials have spoken of the need to cancel elections in order to safeguard democracy if a serious crisis arises. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that in a national emergency the U.S. Constitution may have to be temporarily suspended in order to protect the civil liberties enshrined in that document.

Bizarrely, very few U.S. citizens are protesting. Apparently, they have already learned how to employ doublethink.

Language is being used to control people. People are actually subconsciously brainwashing themselves through the language they use.

The word neocon itself is Newspeak since its use in place of the longer form eliminates all the connotations of the words neoconservative and conservative.

Let’s look at a few more quotes from 1984 to get a better understanding of what is happening today.

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

“Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.”

“But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.”

“The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.”

“Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”

The advocates of globalization often use a form of Newspeak.

When government officials and economists say the economy of a Third World country is booming, despite the fact that they know the masses live in abject poverty, and the media repeat the lie, that is doublethink through Newspeak. Of course, the economy of the country in question is only booming for the globalist and local upper classes, and perhaps also for the middle classes, but somehow almost nobody questions the lie. And the neoliberal globalists are laughing all the way to the bank.

The acceptance of such a lie by the general public is an even greater real-life catastrophe than the fictional one described in 1984. Worse still, some people acknowledge that it is a lie but respond with apathy or slavish resignation in the belief that nothing can be done about the situation.

Do we want to live in dystopia, the worst of all possible worlds, the doubleplusungood of all possible worlds?

If not, we should watch our language and take care that we are still using our higher brain centers.

Monday, October 02, 2006

On Zionism and anti-Semitism

Regarding the New Fault Line on the Left

The author of the article that prompted this post so demeans people that are experiencing anti-Semitism and very much helps anti-Semitism to thrive, which is why I find it absolutely despicable that he opens his piece with: "There are those who take the question of anti-semitism seriously - and those who do not." It is a textbook example of doublespeak.

How can one disagree with that, after all? He begins his piece with one of the most commonly used catch phrases known and catch phrases, as we all know, usually elicit unexamined thought processes, unconscious and knee-jerk reactions.

Here I supply the link to his piece and below, I tear apart, for those with ears to hear and a mind their own, the very premise that his "critique" rests upon. Here is a snip from said article and my response:

"Here, for example, is Steven Rose: 'Anti-semitism is the cheapest rallying cry of Israel's Zionist apologists and one that I, as one of Jewish ethnicity, find particularly nauseating.'

Well, my colleague at the Open University should get his sick bag ready. First, notice the structure of his criticism. Anti-semitism is a 'rallying cry' - it's a way of mobilising people, it's an instrument. This instrumental conception of the question of anti-Semitism rests on two assumptions: first, that there is nothing in the charge, and second, that those who make it do so in bad faith."

Mr. Rose didn't say that all instances of charges of anti-Semitism were erroneous and he didn't say that all such charges had, as their source, "Israel's Zionist apologists," though Jon Pike attempts to insinuate that such is the case. What he did imply, however, was that we should be wary of anything that normally provokes an unconscious response, like patriotism or any blind acceptance of anything.

Pike has extrapolated Rose's comments in just the way necessary to demean his message and, though he could have been mistaken in so many ways in his interpretation, he is mistaken in just such a way as to imply that those who state that false charges of anti-Semitism demean the actual anti-Semitism that exists are, in fact, being anti-Semitic. A more apt example of circular logic I can't think of. As such, he is screaming to be labelled an Israeli apologist and all I can say about that is that every single Jewish friend I have ever had must be crawling with disgust, being misrepresented to the western public. Some, I KNOW, are not so willing to walk down the street as they were a few years ago and a lot of it has to do with the fact that the "Isreali" bloc is ruthless in its condemnation of reason.

Pike may be merely showing his biases (giving the benefit of the doubt) yet biases can perpetuate tyranny just as silence or ignorance can.

Of course there are plenty of people around screaming about Zionists that are merely latching onto the latest, somewhat politically correct way to express their hate but we ought not to lump a Jewish man into that, especially since his words had to be twisted to do so.

I could extrapolate the author's words to - wait a minute - I have it! He is assuming that this is a Jew being anti-Semitic and it must all be that Jewish self-hate and guilt that white racists always talk about. That's it!

But of course, that's not it at all. You see, just because one can rationalize something does not mean that one is being rational.

I, for one, do not confuse religion with race. What more could a Nazi ask for, after all. Jews are being misrepresented by Zionists and the hostility toward Jews continues to grow.

Postscript: I only got as far as the first three paragraphs of Pike's piece when I wrote this response. Upon finishing, I went back and scanned through only to find out that he directly addresses charges that he and others fake concern with anti-Semitism in order to defend Israel. Of course the author could see this charge coming. He knew exactly what he was doing and as is illustrated by my having noticed immediately what he was up to (I am no rocket scientist), so do others.

Everyone needs to get used to the idea, and I mean everyone, that people of their own race are entirely capable of selling them out. This is what makes the threat of these times cross all racial boundaries. Oppressors come in all colors as do the oppressed.

About Me

Short version: I'm not sure how much more eclectic a person can be but I am sure that a lot of individuals consider themselves to be more unique than most - a definite contradiction of course. I was born on the first day of the summer of love and I have been an activist, a geek, a hippie, a bit of a punk, a nomad, a sailor, and a bunch of stuff all in between. I have been a pagan, a buddhist, a zoroastrian, an atheist, blah blah. Labels aside, scanning my posts are a better guage of my interests than any paragraph I can write. Yet I am so much more. Aren't you? LONG VERSION